Life Goes Its Own Way In Surreal 'Beet Queen'

September 7, 1986|By Reviewed by Nancy Pate, Sentinel Book Critic

Extraordinary things happen in Louise Erdrich's powerful new novel The Beet Queen. A mother abruptly abandons her three children at a county fair to fly off into the forever with a barnstorming pilot. A young girl swoops head- first down a frozen slide and smashes into the ice, splintering it into a likeness of Christ's face. A dead woman is propped up in the front seat of a truck, which then inadvertently becomes part of a celebratory parade.

These events, and others no less remarkable, are interspersed over 40 years. Like jewels in a necklace, they are part of a long chain that links the often-ordinary lives of the book's characters. The chain itself is forged out of love and loss and a fierce longing for connection.

As she did in her wondrous first novel, Love Medicine, Erdrich uses multiple viewpoints to tell a multifaceted story. Here the narrative is more linear, but still selective. Erdrich focuses on significant scenes and sequences in brief chapters that have the compact intensity of good short stories. Years may be lost in the intervals but never meaning.

Love Medicine, which was published in 1984, centered on the intertwining stories of two Chippewa families who lived on and around a North Dakota Indian reservation. A couple of Love Medicine's main characters appear fleetingly in the new novel, but one of its minor personages has a starring role in The Beet Queen. Her name is Dot, and in Love Medicine she was the hugely pregnant wife of a runaway convict. In The Beet Queen, we get not only the story of Dot's girlhood in the little North Dakota town of Argus but also her complicated family history.

The book begins in 1932 when 11-year-old Mary Adare arrives in Argus by boxcar from Minnesota, seeking refuge with her Aunt Fritzie. Mary's mother has abandoned her and her two brothers, 14-year-old Karl and a nameless baby. A childless couple has taken the infant; Karl has elected to stay with the train.

Soon the other main characters are introduced: Sita, Mary's spoiled and beautiful cousin who grows up to become a grasping neurotic; and Celestine James, who becomes Mary's best friend and works with her when she eventually takes over the family butcher shop.

Some 20 years later, Karl, who has become a traveling salesman, slips into their lives. He first indulges in a passionate affair with Wallace Pfef, chairman of Argus' chamber of commerce who envisions the town as the sugar beet capital of the world. Then he meets Celestine and fathers the child known as Dot before returning to his wandering ways.

Dot, as an energetic, domineering child and as an angry, spiteful teen, has a profound impact on the dull lives of the other characters. Their love for her binds them together even as it threatens to tear them apart. Wallace, unfairly excluding himself, claims: ''They loved Dot too much, and for that sin she made them miserable.'' In the end, he hopes to give Dot a new image of herself by rigging the results of a festival beauty pageant.

Throughout the book, with breathtaking ease, Erdrich balances the near- mythic with the realistic, the comic with the tragic. Her prose is both poetic and precise, and scene after scene imprints itself on the memory: Celestine shouting ''A miracle!'' at the top of her lungs in a crowded convent; Sita's overnight stay in a mental ward with a roommate who believes she is a cannibal; Celestine dreaming of her unborn child and hearing homemade beer exploding in the basement, ''the sound of glass flying through the earth''; Dot playing Joseph in a Christmas pageant and getting into a fight with the donkey.

When Mary first arrives in Argus she carries with her a blue velvet box. She remembers it as having held her mother's garnet necklace and earrings, but she opens it to find only a few buttons and a pawn ticket.

''I put the jewel box on the dresser I now shared with Sita, and never looked inside again. I didn't let myself think or remember, but got on with living. Still, I couldn't stop the dreams. At night, they appeared, Karl, Mama, my baby brother, and Mr. Ober with his mouth full of grain. They tried to reach through air and earth. They tried to tell me there was rhyme and reason. But I put my hands over my ears.

''I'd lost trust in the past. They were part of a fading pattern that was beyond understanding, and brought me no comfort.''

There is little comfort in The Beet Queen, but there is great compassion and understanding for the rhymes and reasons, the hopes and dreams of people getting on with their lives.